...the first revisor puts a hyphen between the genus and species names,
and from then that hyphenated name is tied to the type of the binominal
name it was formed from, and it doesn't change.

This never caught on, and I think the reason is the offense that's given
by the mismatch between the generic name in the name (so to speak), and
the different genus the species may be assigned to.

fred.
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As names change over time it becomes a major challenge to find everythingpublished about a taxon. Some groups, such as frogs, are especially prone toname changes as their classification is unstable. Frogs have a pretty goodonline database detailing name changes, but most animal groups lack this,leaving people like me floundering around trying to make sense of multiple nameswhy may or may not be for the same thing.

It seems to me that names should be unique and stable. We don't change the nameof a species called "africanus" if we discover that the specimen locality wasactually from Australia, nor do we change the name "maximus" if we subsequentlydiscover a bigger species. But we do if we move it to a new genus. Why?

Presumably it's because we like the idea of being able to interpret the name -two members of the same genus are presumably more closely related to each otherthan to a species in a different genus. But demonstrably that is often untrue(otherwise we wouldn't have all the name changes due to moving species todifferent genera), and we've learnt not to interpret the name literally wheninferring any biological attributes, so why the desire to have the name matchsome current notion of classification? Why not simply accept that we can't inferrelationships from the name?

It seems to be that if we simply stopped trying to make names reflectclassification, at a stroke we'd remove perhaps the primary cause ofnomenclatural instability. For example, the recent case of Drosophilamelanogaster would be a non-issue. It's "Drosophila melanogaster" regardles sofwhether it's nested in the part of the fly tree that includes Sophophora. Therelationships of the taxon would have no bearing on its name.

Discuss.

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK